by Joe Buff
"An index finger, Einzvo?"
"Yes. For one million tons."
"This patrol we'll do it. A record for the ages."
As usual, Beck was torn by Germany's culpability in this war. But they had a right to their God-given place in the world, didn't they? Versailles, post-Nazi occupation by the Allies, endless, dreary Soviet domination in the East—all were made up for now. This was good, wasn't it?
"Sink one million tons, and then sink Challenger," Eberhard said. "What a Christmas gift for our monarch that would make!"
Beck figured Eberhard would be made a baron for sure.
Eberhard would like that: the nobleman's title itself. The validation independent of Eberhard's father, a crass, nouveau-riche investment banker in Stettin, in the Protestant north. The grant of a private estate in occupied French wine country. The long train of beautiful Frenchwomen warming his bed.
Yes, Eberhard would like that a lot.
"Destroy Challenger," Eberhard said, "and the self-infatuated Americans will be one big step closer to having to sue for an armistice."
Deutschland leveled off. Beck and Eberhard read the depth gauge on the captain's instrument display: eleven hundred meters. With her alumina-casing hull and sea pipes, the ship was capable of three or four times that—about fifteen thousand feet. Eberhard lit up again. He sat for a minute, savoring the cigarette and thinking. Beck waited.
"They have no sense of history, the Americans," Eberhard said. "None of what's happening ought to have surprised them. But it did. They're like children, thinking the world should be a nice place, and everyone else should agree with them."
"Unipolarism, they called it, sir, after the end of the Cold War."
"We're giving the world a new unipolarism, aren't we? Once we starve out the U.K., and link up with the Boers in central Africa, we'll control two continents. . . . You have to admit the Boers come in handy." They'd helped spring the giant two-step trap at the start of the war, and they were giving the Allies a two-theater conflict now. Again Beck tried not to react to Eberhard's haughty attitude. He went to his common ground with the captain, as a fellow naval officer: patriotism and duty. But did Eberhard—Germany's greatest U-boat commander—love the sea and his ship as Beck did, or was the ocean to him just water, and Deutschland just a machine? Was Eberhard a patriot, or was he simply using this war for predatory self-advancement, the same way he used everyone and everything else?
ON CHALLENGER, ONE DAY LATER.
Ilse sat elbow to elbow with Kathy Milgrom, at the forward end of the sonar consoles lining the crowded Command and Control Center's port bulkhead. Although they'd both been there a while, the watch had just changed, and fresh crewmen were settling in all around them. Ilse sensed the mood of heightened urgency—they were halfway to the Texas now. Everyone put on a bright face, and fought to stay optimistic, but the relentless tension was taking its toll. The enlisted mess was turned into a war room for the rescue: stacked emergency tools and oxygen canisters, nonstop first-aid drills, constant damage control rehearsals; the men ate standing up. Jeffrey briefed his officers—and Ilse—as soon as Challenger got underway. His words about what they might find when they reached Texas had been pithy, graphic, chilling. Ilse regretted there was nothing she could do to help those poor waiting men, except help get there as quickly as possible.
The CACC, Challenger's control room, was rigged for red, despite the broad daylight twelve hundred feet above
the ship, over the storm-tossed waves and distant mushroom clouds. The subdued lighting had little to do with preserving night vision. In the midst of tactical nuclear war at sea there was no way a submarine would raise a periscope mast by choice, let alone surface and man the bridge cockpit on the sail—the conning tower—even at night. The red fluorescents were used instead to make the computer screens easy on watchstanders'
eyes.
"I'm about done with this module of code," Ilse said—an enhanced model of water temperature versus salinity dynamics.
"I'll be ready for your data bridge in a minute," Kathy said; she was the acting sonar officer. Ilse was the ship's on-board combat oceanographer, formalized now. She'd been teaching and doing research at the University of Cape Town, and was caught in the U.S. at a marine biology conference when the Double Putsch cost her her country—and cost her family their lives for resisting the old-line Boer takeover.
Ilse sat with headphones on, the left ear cup over her left ear, the right one on her cheekbone. This way she could hear the raw signals from outside, and still talk with Kathy. Intermittent thunder on the headphones formed a counterpoint: atom bombs going off, more than fifty miles away, in the latest battle between a supply convoy and the U-boats.
"This American combat systems software is splendid," Kathy said; she was crisp, but expressive, and clearly loved her work. A full-fledged Royal Navy submariner, Kathy was supposed to have had a quiet trip into dry dock to qualify on Challenger, before further combat duty after that. Now, like Ilse, she had been pulled willy-nilly into this rescue mission to Texas; she needed to master her new job very quickly. The two women had already compared their life stories, so Ilse knew Kathy had grown up in Liverpool, then done the Royal Navy Academy at Dartmouth, followed by Oxford and active service in the surface fleet. Kathy's Liverpool accent, its edges softened now, sounded to Ilse's ear
like Irish; she often talked with her hands, to the degree there was room at the consoles. Ilse glanced at Kathy in profile, backlit in red, lit from in front by the blues and greens on her monitors. Kathy was a few inches shorter than Ilse, a few kilos overweight, and wore special submariner eyeglasses. These had narrow frames and small lenses, to fit under an emergency air breather mask. The glasses made Kathy look particularly owlish.
"Agreed," Ilse said. "The fiber-optic network's amazing." Each console did sonar or weapons or target tracking, depending which menu you picked—all three functions were vital in undersea warfare. Ilse typed on her keyboard, massaged the trackmarble with her palm, and touched her screen. It was possible to access the programs for quick enhancements using software tool kits, as she was doing now. . . . Ilse was getting her sea legs back. She lived in a giant machine, with a soul of its own she felt bound to already; the snug control room was its heart. Sonar was its eyes and ears, very dependent on how the sea transmitted and distorted sound—a topic she knew a lot about. Ilse had grown up in urban Johannesburg, the oldest child of a media executive father and a city politician mother, and spoke English with a South African accent; she was also fluent in Afrikaans, the Boer tongue, related to German and Dutch. She'd always loved nature and scuba diving and had wanderlust in her soul—traits that took her to Scripps in San Diego for a Ph.D. in ocean science. During those four years she picked up American slang. She also, in those happier days, dated more than one American male naval officer from the bases around Coronado.
Lieutenant Richard Sessions came over and leaned between Ilse and Kathy. He read their screens—each station had a pair, one above the other, in high-definition full color.
"Quick work," Sessions said. "I see you two won't need much help from me." This pleased Ilse; 'til yesterday he'd been sonar officer,
reporting to Weps, the weapons officer, Lieutenant Jackson Jefferson Bell. With Kathy added to the crew, as an exchange officer from the Royal Navy, Jeffrey had promoted Sessions to navigator, a department head in his own right. The old navigator, Lieutenant Monaghan, was on a hospital ship, in intensive care with a broken neck. Kathy had served on the U.K.'s ceramic sub, HMS Dreadnought, as part of the Royal Navy's initial—and highly controversial—tryout of women in fast-attack crews, something made more palatable to most naysayers by the exigencies of war, the endless demands for talented people. Sessions was in his mid-twenties, from somewhere in Nebraska. Always earnest and polite, he was the sort of person whose hair and clothes seemed a little sloppy no matter what he did.
Sessions reached past Ilse's shoulder and pushed a selector button. Her lower scr
een changed from computer code to a broadband waterfall display. Ilse saw the -like traces of biologics and breaking waves, and watched the merged engine noise of surface ships fleeing from that beleaguered convoy. There were also weird tight spirals on the screen that Ilse knew came from acoustic jammers and decoys, and bright swellings here and there from the nuclear blasts.
"Looks bad," Sessions said.
"Yes." Ilse wondered why Jeffrey wasn't doing something to help, but figured his focus was on Texas. He'd been reclusive since the overcrowded ASDS docked with Challenger; she'd hardly seen him, and felt abandoned. One minute he'd been trying to ask her out, on leave at the hotel in Cape Verde, and she hadn't exactly said no. The next, after his hurried mission briefing, he'd foisted her off on Kathy and disappeared; for this watch, Lieutenant Bell had the deck and the conn.
Sessions straightened and returned to the digital nav table, to confer with his senior chief, the assistant navigator. Kathy spoke with one of the sonar chiefs. Ilse knew that in a very real sense the chiefs made Challenger go—and they'd be the first ones to tell you that. Ilse drank the
dregs of her latest coffee, retrieved the computer code to her display, and went back to work.
She and Kathy discussed some further technical points. Kathy was approachable enough, but Ilse found her a bit reserved. This was probably just her needed persona as a naval officer, dealing with superiors and subordinates in the hierarchy of the ship. It could be because Kathy was new here, still testing the waters as it were. Ilse doubted it had much to do with the sex-balance on Challenger, since she'd had no trouble feeling welcome herself from the get-go: This crew was an elite, and knew no one would be assigned unless they also were very good. There was a strong sense of camaraderie on the ship, built from their shared first taste of combat two weeks ago, strengthened by this compelling new assignment, the Texas.
Well, maybe I'll get to know Kathy better, once we have a chance to unwind together alone in our stateroom.
Ilse felt Kathy stiffen abruptly. "Here we go," she muttered. The Brit put both ear cups firmly in place, and frowned. "Console five," she said into her headset mike, speaking to one of the enlisted sonar techs. "Play back the last ten seconds, starboard wide-aperture array, on bearing zero two five true. Show me the power spectrum."
"What's happening?" Ilse said.
Kathy's lower screen changed to show a jagged, squirming oscilloscope trace, a plot of sound intensity versus frequency, on bearing zero two five over time.
"That." Kathy pointed to a quick blip at about 2000 hertz that stuck out like a sore thumb. On the tape, enhanced, it sounded like a clunk. Kathy froze the picture and studied it. "Console three, give me the ray trace." Her upper screen now showed a tangle of overlapping arcs and sine curves; Ilse's detailed knowledge of ocean mechanics made this plot more precise.
"Conn, Sonar," Kathy called out. "Mechanical transient, bearing zero two five. Closer than our first convergence zone. . . . It isn't friendly."
Jeffrey finished wolfing down a stale ham sandwich alone in the wardroom. He felt Challenger shimmy for a moment, as she passed through a dying shock wave from another distant atomic explosion. He knew the second section of a huge convoy to the U. K. was under attack way up ahead, part two of a shipment of food and heating fuel on dozens of escorted merchant ships. The first section had run into trouble enough the day before, near the path of the Texas. The convoy had sailed in two sections—a day apart and on different routes past the Azores in mid-Atlantic—partly because the number of cargo ships that started out was so large, and partly as a one-two punch to try to overwhelm and blow past the Axis wolf packs. Similar tactics had been used in World War II, with mixed success—and now the U-boats had A-bombs, and silent airindependent propulsion if not nuclear power, and didn't send constant radio reports for the Allies to home on and decode.
Jeffrey heard and felt another detonation. He wished there was something he could do to help those merchant mariners. Half a year into the war, Great Britain was already starving, the initial six-month surge capacity of the Allies' submarine fleets was nearing exhaustion, and the killing North Atlantic storms had barely begun. But the convoy action was too far off for Challenger to make much difference. Besides, she had a pressing engagement elsewhere, Jeffrey's preoccupation: Texas, Texas, Texas. Her hundred or so combat-experienced American submariners—or as many as would actually live and recover from their injuries—were a priceless war-fighting asset, even with their ship herself lost. They were also an invaluable prize, if the enemy got to them first. Jeffrey rubbed sleep-deprived eyes. Spread before him on the wardroom table were hard copies of Virginia-class blueprints and subsystem diagrams. Just as he had for most of the past twenty-four hours—often in conference with his engineer, Lieutenant Willey, and with COB Jeffrey was
trying to understand what the men aboard Texas might do to survive, and what Challenger might best do to aid them once she reached the scene. It would take several hours to evacuate the survivors, shuttling them from Texas to Challenger in Jeffrey's ASDS. It would be tragic indeed if some succumbed to wounds or oxygen deprivation while waiting their turn, when salvation was so near.
One of the wardroom intercoms barked. To Jeffrey the signal, the growler, always sounded like a shih tzu puppy. More stressed-out than usual, Jeffrey winced at this mental connection: His family had had a shih tzu when he was growing up, in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. In a sick way, he was here now because of that dog. He'd found the shih tzu, his family, his playmates, the town, all excruciatingly ordinary, and he didn't try to hide it. His father was a local utility regulator—a career bureaucrat—
his mother a nondescript housewife, his two older sisters—and their husbands—painfully bourgeois. He had always felt a burning need to escape from there and achieve something really special. Jeffrey sometimes wondered if this was a genetic quirk, or if he'd been mixed up with another baby at the hospital. In fifth grade, by accident, he discovered the naval history section at his local library, and quickly became addicted to the stuff—it soothed that savage, painful craving in his breast. As soon as he could, in a rather heavy-handed way, he left home for Purdue with a Navy scholarship, and after that joined the SEALs, till bad scar tissue in a leg required he be transferred; he picked submarines. Basically, Jeffrey'd run away to sea and hadn't looked back, and his family, not nearly as dull as Jeffrey had judged them to be, resented it. Jeffrey sighed. They had little contact with him now, and vice versa, and much of that was his fault. In fact, Jeffrey's father—deeply involved in America's desperate energyconservation program these days—seemed to blame Jeffrey somehow for the war. After all, Jeffrey was Navy. The Navy should have known, should have done something sooner,
not been suckered into that nuclear ambush off western Africa that cost three carriers. Jeffrey forced himself back to the present: the growler. Its ringer was hand-powered from the other end by turning a little crank, which everyone had their own way of doing, their "fist." Jeffrey could tell this call was from his acting XO, Lieutenant Bell, who this watch was officer of the deck.
Jeffrey gulped the last of his iced tea, wiped his lips with a white cloth napkin, then lifted the handset. "Captain."
"Sir," Bell said, "Sonar just picked up a mechanical transient. Submerged, left of the bearing to the convoy, and much closer to Challenger."
Closer? Jeffrey's heart quickened. "What's Milgrom's best guess of the range?"
"Maybe fifty thousand yards." Twenty-five nautical miles. Hmmm . . . "What's her assessment?"
"She thinks it was an underwater probe and drogue connecting, trying to hide in the reverb from that latest detonation."
"Some kind of undersea replenishment," Jeffrey said. "Probably pulled back for a breather from the running fight northeast of us."
"Yes, sir. Milgrom says she heard something like it once before, on Dreadnought, but that time the targets evaded. It's definitely Axis."
Good. That's why Kathy was here, a bit of cro
ss-pollination between American and Royal Navy ceramic-hulled submarine crews. Jeffrey stood up decisively, from the sacrosanct captain's place at the head of the wardroom table. Captain Wilson's place.
"I'll be right there, XO. Rig for ultraquiet and deep submergence. Sound silent general quarters, man battle stations antisubmarine."
Jeffrey quickly piled the Texas work papers onto the sideboard. He ducked into the pantry to bus his dirty dishes.
Lying loose they might become dangerous projectiles—and the wardroom doubled as Challenger's operating theater. On the way, for the umpteenth time, he glanced at the wardroom data repeaters. The ship was approaching latitude 29° 28' north. Jeffrey was glad he hadn't opened that "RECURVE ARBOR" courier envelope. Some kind of secret orders? Which base to head for in the U.S.? Updated recognition codes for when they reached home waters?
Well, taking the fine print literally, he hadn't crossed 30 north yet—and there might be something in the package to limit his tactical discretion. For him, all the lives on the convoy—and the vital cargoes they carried—had to outweigh a single stranded crew on an already sunken submarine . . . didn't they?
Besides, here was a chance for Jeffrey's first independent kill. He was half afraid he wouldn't see combat before the East Coast and dry dock. Once hard and demanding Captain Wilson recovered, Jeffrey would revert to XO, taking orders in battle, not giving them.
Jeffrey climbed the ladder up one deck. He strode to the command workstation in the center of the CACC.
It occurred to Jeffrey that it hadn't occurred to him to be nervous making his first deliberate attack as acting captain, a big step in any naval officer's career. But as he'd discovered as a much younger lieutenant ( j.g.), badly wounded on a black op in Iraq in '
96, he didn't mind dying half so much as he minded being bored. The intense comradeship of people being shot at dispelled his gnawing sense of inner emptiness. The difference this time, though, was Jeffrey was almost forty, with everything that implied. And the burden of command was not one ounce diminished since his first taste of enemy fire; the unforgiving trade-offs of life-versus-life, that soul-wrenching calculus of war, only got harder, more wearing with age. He had never felt so lonely as in the past day, with no one, no one, to relieve the ultimate pressures of his responsibility as captain, or to share the blame in case he failed.